QNED Delay
Samsung Display (pvt) likes to hedge its bets. While it is in the early stages of promoting and producing its QD/OLED technology, it has been researching the development of nanorods, which we first mentioned back in 2020 as a way for the company to offset the use of a fluorescent blue emitter in its QD/OLED displays. Nanorods are small structures that are ‘grown’ using the same materials used for LEDs, and as the direction of the growth can be controlled, these structures are grown as rods, which are bunched together to form a light source, in this case a blue one. The nanorods generate blue light which is then converted into red and green via quantum dots. While that sounds relatively simple, getting the nanorods, which are less than 1um wide to stand up next to each other is a bit like herding cats, they tend to go in every direction, so Samsung is using a process called dielectrophoresis, similar to the process used to separate platelets from whole blood, which aligns the rods by using an electric field. The process lines up the rods vertically, which represents a major step toward the commercialization of the process.
That said, the process is still under development, as regulating the number of nanorods in each sub-pixel is key to maintaining brightness consistency across the display, and that is just one of the issues that face SDC during the nanorod development process and expectations that SDC has solved most of the nanorod issues last year gave confidence to some that SDC would move the technology toward the development of a pilot production line this year. It seems that SDC has decided to postpone the construction of the nanorod production line and has sent back the team that was to implement the new line to their former positions and returned the project to the R&D level.
SDC had originally planned to produce nanorod based displays sometime in 2024 or 2025 however the line postponement seems to have pushed that back a year or so, which might affect the plans of parent Samsung Electronics (005930.KS), who is looking to augment its TV lineup with more premium products, which nanorod displays would have supported. While SDC has built a 30,000 sheet/month fab for its QD/OLED display production, thyat capacity represents only a small portion of what Samsung Electronics would need to make the technology a featured product, and while the initial reception to QD/OLED technology has been positive, without some sort of capacity expansion QD/OLED would have to remain a niche product against LG Display’s OLED TVs, which are expected to see between 9m and 10m units shipped this year. Perhaps the postponement of the nanorod project foretells a decision by SDC to expand QD/OLED capacity, but no announcement has been made as of yet, “You are burnin’ daylight”
That said, the process is still under development, as regulating the number of nanorods in each sub-pixel is key to maintaining brightness consistency across the display, and that is just one of the issues that face SDC during the nanorod development process and expectations that SDC has solved most of the nanorod issues last year gave confidence to some that SDC would move the technology toward the development of a pilot production line this year. It seems that SDC has decided to postpone the construction of the nanorod production line and has sent back the team that was to implement the new line to their former positions and returned the project to the R&D level.
SDC had originally planned to produce nanorod based displays sometime in 2024 or 2025 however the line postponement seems to have pushed that back a year or so, which might affect the plans of parent Samsung Electronics (005930.KS), who is looking to augment its TV lineup with more premium products, which nanorod displays would have supported. While SDC has built a 30,000 sheet/month fab for its QD/OLED display production, thyat capacity represents only a small portion of what Samsung Electronics would need to make the technology a featured product, and while the initial reception to QD/OLED technology has been positive, without some sort of capacity expansion QD/OLED would have to remain a niche product against LG Display’s OLED TVs, which are expected to see between 9m and 10m units shipped this year. Perhaps the postponement of the nanorod project foretells a decision by SDC to expand QD/OLED capacity, but no announcement has been made as of yet, “You are burnin’ daylight”
Nanorod Structure - Source: Samsung
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